Sian Reynolds challenges the prevailing assumption that women had little influence or power in France during the interwar period. She combines extensive empirical research with revealing insights into France's political history and women's history.

This groundbreaking and authoritative book on French wine draws on painstaking research by leading wine writer Andrew Jefford, who has travelled extensively in each of France's fourteen wine regions, to investigate the personalities and producers who have masterminded the resurgence of the French wine industry.Produ cer listings are a significant and important feature of the book as Jefford covers the background of those producers he feels most worthy of mention for their contribution to the world of wine and their own individual wines. There is up-to-the-minute research on terroir and its effect on the wines of each region, and how accurately it is reflected by the controversial appellation controlee system.

The perfect pesto. The best bouillabaisse. The purest paella.

In a groundbreaking book that challenges many assumptions about gender and politics in the French Revolution, Suzanne Desan offers an insightful analysis of the ways the Revolution radically redefined the family and its internal dynamics. She shows how revolutionary politics and laws brought about a social revolution within households and created space for thousands of French women and men to reimagine their most intimate relationships. Families negotiated new social practices, including divorce, the reduction of paternal authority, egalitarian inheritance for sons and daughters alike, and the granting of civil rights to illegitimate children. Contrary to arguments that claim the Revolution bound women within a domestic sphere, The Family on Trial maintains that the new civil laws and gender politics offered many women unexpected opportunities to gain power, property, or independence. The family became a political arena, a practical terrain for creating the Republic in day-to-day life. From 1789, citizens across France-sons and daughters, unhappily married spouses and illegitimate children, pamphleteers and moralists, deputies and judges-all disputed how the family should be reformed to remake the new France. They debated how revolutionary ideals and institutions should transform the emotional bonds, gender dynamics, legal customs, and economic arrangements that structured the family. They asked how to bring the principles of liberty, equality, and regeneration into the home. And as French citizens confronted each other in the home, in court, and in print, they gradually negotiated new domestic practices that balanced Old Regime customs with revolutionary innovations in law and culture. In a narrative that combines national-level analysis with a case study of family contestation in Normandy, Desan explores these struggles to bring politics into households and to envision and put into practice a new set of familial relationships.